Axle HD 5670 packs nice overclocking potential

Axle HD 5670 chilled by Arctic Cooling is a card that, as the name suggests, should be capable of some nice overclocking potential. Although HD 5670 isn’t quite what you’d call an awesome gaming card, you can always resort to overclocking and get some nice performance at lower resolutions (1680x1050). Note that the card runs at reference clocks.

ATI Overdrive doesn’t allow for overclocking over 850MHz for the GPU so we used MSI’s Afterburner, which allowed us to reach 950MHz with ease. Axle claims the card can work at 980MHz for the GPU, and we’re going to check whether that’s indeed true.

Overclocking brought about 17.4% better results in Dirt 2 at 1680x1050. This resulted in pleasant gaming at about 42 fps. Thanks to our overclock, FurMark saw results increased by 20% - from 1708 to 2050.

Axle wisely opted on Arctic Cooling’s solution, which is quiet and allows for fan RPM regulation via ATI Overdrive and similar tools.The reference HD 5670 doesn’t have the 6-pin PCIe power connector you see on Axle’s HD 5670, as Axle included it to support overclocking. In fact, our attempts to turn the computer on without connecting the aforementioned connector were in vain and Axle HD 5670 emitted a beeping sound, which signaled that we forgot the 6-pin connector.

The I/O panel features VGA, dual-link DVI and HDMI connector. The cooler is as you can see, dual slot, which isn’t the case with the reference card. The card is pretty quiet during operation but it isn’t inaudible and the fan runs at 50% RPM in idle mode. Naturally, you can sacrifice a couple of °C to get to the point where the card will be inaudible. Stay tuned as we’ll have the full review soon enough.